Henry Gabriel Anker

My paintings are abstract allegorical landscapes of interwoven visual and narrative symbols. These symbols do not function as citational didactics but as enigmatic narrative projections. With each painting pointing back to the ones that preceded it, I am in conversation with the past. I mine utopian theory for inquiries into alchemy, movement, gender, and color:

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Kareem-Anthony Ferreira

I trace patterns of personal, familial, and social identity within the genre of Black portraiture. As a first-generation Canadian with strong Trinidadian roots, I grew up in two different cultural milieus. My practice grows from this concern: a negotiation of my enduring cultural divergence between displacement and indigeneity; divided, yet rooted in multiple places at once.

Amber Esseiva

Title: 
Associate Curator
Last Name: 
Esseiva
Head Shot: 
Bio: 

 

Affiliation: 
Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University

Ruth Erickson

Title: 
Mannion Family Curator
Last Name: 
Erickson
Head Shot: 
Bio: 

Ruth Erickson is Mannion Family Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where she has curated exhibitions of work by Kevin Beasley, Mark Dion, Rokni and Ramin Haerizadeh, Ethan Murrow, and Wangechi Mutu, among others. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including France and the Visual Arts since 1945: Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art (2018), Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist (2017), Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 (2015), Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (2015), and Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology (2014).

Affiliation: 
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Heather Rubinstein

My work signals its history from the material properties of fabrics—what happens when the fabrics are subjected to various procedures: cutting, folding, sewing, staining, dyeing, and brushwork. For my purposes, domestic fabrics such as bedsheets or drapes (always sourced from thrift stores) work better than traditional canvas. I like their porousness and flexibility as well as their status as recycled, repurposed products. My paintings are informed by postwar European abstraction (Alberto Burri, Supports/Surfaces, Sigmar Polke) and the Pattern & Decoration movement, but I try to avoid

SV Randall

My work examines the relationship between consumer, commodity, and transformation. Within a culture of feverish consumption and retinal impatience I often make “fast” objects by the slowest means possible. The resulting sculptures, photographs, and installations represent overlooked objects rendered in symbolic materials.

Amy Nathan

I apply pressure to images and language to crack them open, make them tactile, and dilate them into an expanded space. Images and words are my starting points for painted, faceted sculptures, in which I complicate and play with an internal/ external push-and-pull. My work speaks to many subjects— politics and power, the body’s visceral reaction to its environment, conversations between the haptic and the retinal—but there is a consistency in my examination of forces in opposition, and a need to open up and aerate an idea. My pieces incorporate visual puns:

Shalen Stephenson

I work within the realm of abstraction, exposing the visually unknown through a process of superimposing layers of paint and other materials on a substrate. I am interested in incorporating materials and processes from traditional painting practices along with commercial and industrial applications. I continuously build on systematic modes of production while also trying to disrupt and counteract my personal desires to create a harmonious composition. I am fascinated with creating and referencing contemporary visual languages, subsuming,

Kurosh Yahyai

I am interested in portraying primitive human emotions. Emotions such anxiety, anger, compulsion, sex, fear, confusion, self-doubt, lust, and existential questioning. My intention is for the viewer to experience a visceral reaction to the work. Tension in my work is important as I create a familiar/comfortable space that is also unsettling and alien for the viewer. The familiar/ comfortable elements can be interpreted through the objects in the paintings referencing the home, while the surface treatments and manipulations of these elements can give an unknown feeling.

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